Tips to make an SEO friendly shopping cart

Search engine traffic is one of the most important factors that decide the success of an online shopping cart. Hence the shopping cart design that you choose must be SEO friendly. This will help in producing the best results, inviting the targeted customers to visit your website and use the shopping cart. A SEO friendly shopping cart doesn’t mean the features visible to you and your customers. It also means the features that the spiders and crawlers of the search engines look for. Here are a few tips to develop an SEO friendly shopping cart.

• Most of the web pages and shopping cart pages have meta titles, descriptions and keyword tags. But certain web developers advice to include tags like anchor title tags, for texts and images.

Use of alt tags also increases the search engine traffic. Most of the search engine spiders, bots and crawlers look for alt tags.

A shopping cart design made without the optimization of these tags won’t produce the needed results.• Your shopping cart should be compatible in text based browser too. You should also view the cart after disabling the Java script.

Taking all these factors in to account will increase the performance of your shopping cart whereas ruling out these factors will decrease about 10-15% of your total potential revenue.

• People with disabilities may use sound browsers. The cart that you create should be compatible to such browsers. • Avoid error pages like "Page Not Found", "Fatal Error on....” etc, which are usually shown when your online store is down. It can also be seen when an unexpected result comes out of a database query.

Most of the users won’t be prepared for such messages. Hence these messages will give them an unprofessional feeling.

• Most of the shopping cart users are worried about the authenticity of the websites. Adding the necessary logos, like PayPal logo, gives a feeling of security to the users.

Not sure about the ethos of your post but in any event, just so there'e no misunderstanding:

"Search engine traffic is one of the most important factors that decide the success of an online."

Not really, traffic is useful but just traffic. A website that concentrates on converting visitors to customers is what's needed, with search engine considerations second in the queue.

"A SEO friendly shopping cart doesn’t mean the features visible to you and your customers."

That kind of misses the whole point. Apart from conversion needs mentioned above, SEO is all about what is visible to customers. Apart from indirect value, such as good quality content drawing good quality links which help with search, modern search engines are primarily interested in content.

All the mentions of tags etc. have minor merit in some cases but major search engines don't even look at keyword tags, or several types of title tag, or most meta tags and only use description tags for snippets, not ranking.

The greatest technical enemy of shopping carts is poor configuration. Making crawling or understanding the site hard for search engines and visitors, or creating content duplication under different URLs. A far larger problem however is content, they are often no more than online brochures and even then filed with product descriptions that can be found on many other sites.

Build a unique and captivating site instead, make sure the web knows about this and keep building, keep enthralling. Search engines will soon be running up the road, desperate to include the popular and valuable to fulfil their business model. If you put up the same old same, you can spend your life filling tags all over the place, won't help.